CKC: A war that your government started and then lost.
Visitor: My grandfather fought in the Great War. I'm still not sure why it started.
CKC: In college I majored in history and our first tutorial was on what very question. The more we read, the more puzzled we became. As an Austrian statesman said back in 1914, the situation is tragic but not serious. In his ironic way, he was observing that millions would die, but no one knew quite why. Later Barbara Tuchman tried to wrap her mind around the imbroglio in The Guns of August.
Visitor: "imbroglio"?
CKC: Sorry, "a difficult or perplexing state of affairs."
Visitor: I want to say more about the social conditions that allowed my father's generation to listen to nativist appeals.
CKC: You have mentioned hyper-inflation and defeat in the war.
Visitor: Also, they were in a country with a vigorous Communist party and on a continent shared with Stalin's regime.
CKC: Neither is part of the U.S. situation.
Visitor: Then there was the very rapid social change during the Weimar era between the war's end and the rise of the Nazis.
CKC: Well, my country has also changed remarkably since my own childhood: the role of women in the workplace and their "right to choose," the coming out of the closet by gays"
Visitor: But even in this area, you did not experience the sharp contrast between traditional Germany and what seemed to be social chaos under the Weimar Republic. In literature in English you can glimpse this in the writings of Christopher Isherwood.
CKC: Okay, you have talked about hyper-inflation, loss of a war, reparations, a strong domestic Communist party, the threat of nearby Stalinism, and rapid social change at home. Anything else?
Visitor: Germany had largely missed the great age of European colonialism. The sun never set on the British Empire. The French had colonies in Africa and Asia. The Belgians had the Congo; the Portuguese, Brazil; the Spanish, much of the rest of Latin America Even your country had the Philippines for a while.
CKC: So what are you saying? Germans of your father's generation were open to the lure of more living-space?
Visitor: of lebensraum? It must have seemed only fair: to expand, to rule people regarded as savages or at least less advanced. Didn't some of your ancestors in the U.S. have a not dissimilar attitude about "Indians"?
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